1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to distributed data processing systems and in particular to distributed data processing systems with cluster-aware virtual input/output servers (VIOSes). Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a method, data processing system and computer program product for efficient backup and restore operations within a VIOS cluster environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Virtualized data processing system configuration, which provides the virtualization of processor, memory and Operating System (OS) resources are becoming more and more common in the computer (and particularly the computer server) industry. To a lesser extent, storage virtualization is also known and provided in limited environments. Within a storage virtualization environment, one or more virtual input/output servers (VIOSes) can be provided for handling I/O operations of the virtualized client logical partitions (LPARs). Currently, backup and restoration processes performed on such systems are individualized, manually driven and very time consuming.